Prison Doors Open: Poetic Justice of Elizabeth Fry by by Margot Elizabeth Van Sluytman/Raven Speaks

Voices as One
HER glory showers
Tremendous poignancy upon
Our persistent walk. We are
Joined. Siblings in Spirit.
Imbibing the hymn of
Reformation. The song
Of justice. The canticle
Of joy and freedom.
©Margot Van Sluytman

In our About Page for Feminism and Religion, resides the words in the paragraph that follows. In choosing to write about Elizabeth Fry, I reverted to those words, for they highlight the who and the how of Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker woman, born in 1780. The words in that paragraph shine a light on the fact that Elizabeth Fry’s lived-experience of feminism, and indeed religion, continues to reverberate. A reverberation that is consistent with, and intricately linked to: justice, joy, and Sawbonna: shared-humanity.

There is no single definition of feminism and this is a place of many voices. The purpose of FAR is to further feminist dialogue while nurturing one another’s work, even across our differences.  Our tone should be encouraging rather than judgmental. We all bring our own feminist perspectives and practices to the conversation and that should be welcomed. It may be that in our encounter with one another across the diversity of our contexts and experiences our definitions of feminisms may be expanded – a sign that feminism is alive and grounded in the lived reality of people’s lives.

Thinking about feminism and religion is to think about the voice of womyn. To celebrate, to honour, and to recognize the history of voices and community that have in-formed, re-formed, and trans-formed how we live justly. How we live fairly. How we live equitably.

Feminism and religion, and its relationship to re-wording and to re-storying life is never divorced from profound and lifelong commitments within the context and the crucible of the places and the spaces in which Godde is alive. Alive. Alive. Thriving each and every moment of each and every day of our lives.

Elizabeth Fry was a social reformer. An individual who lived into the values of shared humanity: Sawbonna. Her focus was not on forgiveness and making womyn “better” based on epistemology and rhetoric. Her social reform was what might be termed “boots to the ground”. In the literal places: prisons, where womyn found themselves due to poverty, abuse, lack of supports, and patriarchal norms wherein womyn’s earning power and how and where that can be done were, and as yet are, limited, and profoundly limiting.

Attempts to relegate womyn and our voices to a place where inadequacy and dismissal are seen as the norm, means that daily with words to the page and with “boots to the ground”, like Elizabeth Fry, we too are the re-formers who trans-form and are re-formed and trans-formed.

Womyn continue to be exploited both behind the prison bars that we can see and the prison bars that we cannot. Once our concern is awakened, closing our eyes is no longer possible. Ignorance is no longer possible. Choosing to act behoves us.

Prison Reform and prisoner rehabilitation are both predicated upon a recognition of our shared humanity; a recognition of the need and value for each of us to know that we can earn our way to be able to support ourselves and our families, and in so doing enrich our communities and societies.

Within the context of religion and within the framework of feminism, within the context of poetic justice and poetic justness, we can learn and we can teach the importance of how and why words that we use, words that are used about us and around us, sculpt possibility, birthing new understandings within the context of the heart of the intellect and the intellect of the heart.

When I have sat down with womyn in prisons in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, I have been sitting with sisters in spirit.  With family connected to lineages of child bearing and child rearing. Connected to a knowing that our voices will never be silenced and will forever be heard because of our link, our lineage, and our persistent and consistent, longing for love and for justice.

Celebrating Elizabeth Fry is to celebrate our very selves as a new year calls out to us for our voices. For our pens to pages and keyboards. For our boots to the ground. In allyship and sisterhood with Betsy Fry. A continuity of Godde’s love and shared-committment.

The Elizabeth Fry Society of Peterborough